Cisco Enhances AI Security with Zero Trust and AI Defense Explorer

Particularly interesting to see Zero Trust extended to AI agents, identity and least-privilege access for non-human entities is going to be one of the defining challenges of the next few years.

[JUST ANNOUNCED] 📣 Cisco Reimagines Security for the Agentic Workforce. With end-to-end security across Al actions, Cisco is helping organizations confidently deploy Al agents at scale 👇 #RSAC26

SAN FRANCISCO, March 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced significant security innovations designed for the agentic AI ecosystem, where software no longer just answers questions—it acts. At RSA Conference 2026, Cisco is introducing solutions to address AI security issues and remove a top barrier to agent adoption. By establishing trusted identities, enforcing strict Zero Trust Access controls, hardening agents before deployment, enforcing guardrails at runtime, and giving security operations center (SOC) teams the tools to stop threats at machine speed, Cisco is building security into the foundation of the emerging AI economy. https://lnkd.in/eubyE8Rj

Today’s bit Cisco extends Zero Trust to AI agents 85% of enterprises are experimenting with AI agents. Only 5% have moved them to production. The main reason? Security. At RSA Conference, Cisco announced Zero Trust Access for AI agents — identity management, scoped permissions, real-time monitoring. Because an agent acting autonomously on your network is a new kind of actor, and most security models weren’t built for it. The attack surface is evolving. The question is whether enterprise IT is keeping up. What’s your take?

Agentic AI is not just a developer problem. It is a security problem your CISO needs a framework for - now. Cisco used RSA Conference 2026 to make a specific argument: the traditional perimeter model does not hold when AI agents can act autonomously across systems, APIs, and data stores. The question for CIOs is not whether agentic AI introduces risk. It does. The question is whether your security architecture was built with that assumption or is being retrofitted after the fact. In this note, I examine what Cisco actually announced at RSAC 2026, what it signals about their security roadmap, and the viability question technology leaders should be asking before committing to this platform direction. Read the full research note on SoftwareReviews: https://lnkd.in/e5MWzg5p If you are evaluating your security stack ahead of an agentic AI rollout, this is worth 10 minutes of your time. #CIO #CISO #AgenticAI #CyberSecurity #EnterpriseAI #Cisco #RSAC2026 #AIRisk #TechStrategy Thanks Grace Chung Joely Urton

Agentic AI multiplies identity sprawl in ways we’ve never seen before. Where users once leveraged a couple devices each, they now oversee ten times that through agents acting on their behalf across our networks. Cisco tackles this head-on by establishing trust from the start, securing those agents during runtime, and empowering defenders to operate at true machine speed. New announcements this week for RSA from Cisco: Zero trust access tailored for agents, rigorous AI defense testing, and agentic capabilities right in the SOC. These pieces lock in security at the foundation level. That gives organizations real confidence to push agentic AI from pilot projects into full production scale. #Ciscopartners https://lnkd.in/eZ7WvwV5

Cisco builds security framework for safe enterprise adoption of AI agents: Cisco has introduced solutions to address AI security issues and remove a top barrier to agent adoption. By establishing trusted identities, enforcing strict zero trust Access controls, hardening agents before deployment, enforcing guardrails at runtime, and giving SOC teams the tools to stop threats at machine speed, Cisco is building security into the foundation of the emerging AI economy. “AI agents aren’t just making existing work faster; they’re a new workforce of co-workers that dramatically … More → The post Cisco builds security framework for safe enterprise adoption of AI agents appeared first on Help Net Security.

🔐 Cisco just put a 'Claw' on AI agent security — and it couldn't come soon enough. At RSA Conference 2026, Cisco unveiled DefenseClaw — an open-source framework built specifically for securing agentic AI in production. It ships with four tools that cover the pipeline end to end: an MCP Scanner that checks MCP servers for malicious actions before they go live, a Skills Scanner that sandboxes agent capabilities, an AI Bill of Materials that auto-inventories every AI asset in your environment, and CodeGuard for code-level protection. The whole thing hooks into NVIDIA's OpenShell for runtime enforcement, and Cisco is extending Zero Trust all the way to agents — agentic IAM in Duo, MCP policy enforcement in Secure Access SSE, and agent discovery in Cisco Identity Intelligence. The timing makes sense when you look at the numbers. MCP just crossed 97 million monthly downloads. Security researchers scanning ~2,000 publicly accessible MCP servers found that all of them lacked authentication — every single one. There's already been at least one real breach: the Postmark incident, where one malicious npm package blind-copied every email flowing through compromised MCP servers. When a protocol goes from side project to foundational infrastructure in 16 months, security tooling has to sprint to catch up. DefenseClaw being open source is the right call — this can't be a vendor moat problem, it needs to be a community-solved one. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eB-QBcpr #AI #AIAgents #MCP #Security #DevSecOps #ZeroTrust #Cisco #RSA2026 #PlatformEngineering #Infrastructure #OpenSource #AgenticAI #ArtificialIntelligence

At Cisco Live EMEA 2026, the SOC team focused on a simple mission: Protect. Detect. Educate. Innovate. One key innovation was bridging Cisco XDR with Splunk Enterprise Security to streamline SOC escalations, automatically transferring incidents, observables, analyst notes, and AI summaries between platforms. The result: less manual pivoting, better collaboration across analyst tiers, and faster investigations. Read more to see how SOC workflows can be simplified with automation and integration: https://cs.co/6043B6whuH #CiscoSecurity #CiscoLive #XDR #Splunk